How to refinish aluminum

Submitted by Dan on Sun, 02/09/2014 - 14:20

While restoring my CL200, all the aluminum had to be refinished: the engine side covers, wheel hubs, and fork tubes. Honda originaly covered them in a clear coat to protect from oxidation, but over the years that clear coat turned yellow, and any scratches and nicks allowed oxidation to creep in and crawl around. The result was a very ugly, very tarnished surface. Here's how I cleaned them up.

Whelp, I found her, my dream bike: Honda CL200 Scrambler

Submitted by Dan on Sun, 02/09/2014 - 13:18

For as long as I can remember, I've had my eyes peeled for a sweet old motorcycle. Not a Harley, not a crotchrocket, just a nice, standard motorcycle. And from the 60s or 70s. Well, I think I finally found her: a 1974 Honda CL200 Scrambler. Turns out it's a rare bird–it's the much less popular, "scrambler" twin to the CB200. 1974 was actually the only year they made them! It features high pipes for better off-road clearance, the moto-style bars, and off-road styling cues. I dig it!

Why You Should Not Use WYSIWYG Website Editors

Submitted by Dan on Tue, 12/03/2013 - 15:20

I built a perfect, beautiful, wonderful website using the Drupal CMS, Amason S3 and CloudFront for Atipa Technologies. Everything worked flawlessly and looked amazing. After I left the company, they decided to duplicated the work of a real web developer with one of those WYSWYG website editor (Adobe Muse by the looks of the source code). The result, as you can see, is pitiful. An uninspired child could make a better website than that. For shame...

Introducing: suitpicker.com

Submitted by Dan on Wed, 09/18/2013 - 13:42

A few months ago while thinking about purchasing a new suit, I was looking for some sort of website that would let me mix and match different colors and patterns and see how they would look. There was no website like that. So I decided to build me own! Suitpicker.com helps you find the best color combination to choose that perfect suit you've been looking for. It provides a way to test ideas before trying them out at the store.

The Future of HPC: Advanced Computing Interfaces?

Submitted by Dan on Sat, 06/29/2013 - 15:39

My article on wikiHow, How to Build a Supercomputer must have struck the right chord–it's been read over 50,000 times as of writing this. The hardware part is easy, if you have the cash. The software part, however, requires much more know-how and experience. Many of the tuning tricks–such as turning off IGMP snooping to reduce overhead in the switches, and using an 8x8GB memory configuration (as opposed to 4x16GB) to reduce the latency/bandwidth bottleneck of Piledriver CPUs–are crucial to making the investment worth the money.

Danny Mantyla

Submitted by Dan on Wed, 06/05/2013 - 13:16

Dan Mantyla is a full-stack web developer and the webmaster for Kansas Public RadioKansas Rural Center, and The Kansas Audio-Reader Network. With years of hands-on experience in both front-end and back-end web development, and with a BSCS from the University of Kansas, Danny has done everything from contributing to open-source web frameworks, to designing custom websites from scratch, to implementing advanced HPC cluster management architectures in Python. In 2015, Dan wrote Functional Programming in JavaScript. He lives in beautiful Lawrence, KS, home base to his alma mater, birthplace of Python Django and the cookie (the internet kind, not the tasty kind) and the center of Google Earth.

Introducing: dan·nix

Submitted by Dan on Fri, 04/19/2013 - 14:59

Dan - noun (dein) - First name of Daniel Mantyla, utility infielder of all things software development, and creator of this website.

*nix - noun (stahr·nix) - A Unix-like operating system, one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification.